


Recreation

by yeaka



Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types, The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: M/M, Sexual Fantasy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-15
Updated: 2017-07-15
Packaged: 2018-12-02 08:44:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11505798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yeaka/pseuds/yeaka
Summary: If Glorfindel can manage Erestor’s puzzle, he’ll win a prize.





	Recreation

**Author's Note:**

  * For [avocado_bros_4thewin](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=avocado_bros_4thewin).



> A/N: Fill for mrpineapple42’s “#3 puzzle Glorestor” request on [my tumblr](http://yeaka.tumblr.com/) [from this list](http://yeaka.tumblr.com/post/162565904960/prompt-list-3).
> 
> Disclaimer: I don’t own The Lord of the Rings or The Silmarillion or any of their contents, and I’m not making any money off this.

“Come in,” he’s told, and he does, even though he’d hoped to meet Erestor in the gardens by now for their morning stroll. Erestor uses the time to give Glorfindel the latest reports, which should be incorporated into the movements of Glorfindel’s guard: coordinating both their separate staffs. But Glorfindel uses these mornings more to simply enjoy time with his friend, to breathe in the rich scent of Erestor after a fresh bath, to watch the sunlight play across his dark hair, to listen to the lilting tones of his voice, still undamaged from issuing orders about the rest of the day. This morning, Glorfindel arrived alone, and when his ever-punctual counterpart didn’t show, he knew something was wrong.

Erestor doesn’t _sound_ as though anything’s terribly amiss, though there is a slight air of annoyance and weariness to him that crops up from time to time. His job is a stressful one, and he works himself too hard. Glorfindel drifts across his quarters to join him by the desk in the corner, where a pile of little puzzle pieces forms a sloping hill. One corner is completed, though not by much, and only a few other chunks hold together. Glorfindel hasn’t seen anything like this in _centuries_ , since Tuor first had one devised for Eärendil. But of course Imladris would learn of them eventually; it has many dealings with Men, and the even more creative dwarves.

Erestor doesn’t seem the type for such idle games, but he sighs as Glorfindel joins him. He murmurs, “I am sorry; my lateness is inexcusable.”

“You are forgiven,” Glorfindel promises, reaching for two pieces to try together that turn out not to match. The puzzle is, perhaps, a more interesting development than their morning walk anyway; Glorfindel always enjoys a glimpse into Erestor’s private life, which is normally kept under such control. He sifts through pieces as he asks, “What is this of?”

“I do not know,” Erestor answers. “It was given to me centuries ago by Lord Elrond himself, and yet it is such a large thing with such small pieces that I have never managed to complete enough to garner the picture. Every time I have come close, some new matter will crop up which requires my desk and my attention, and I will pack it all away again to avoid the distraction. I fear the same will happen now, though I thought I might try once again now that events have slowed somewhat beyond our walls. I would dearly like to know what it is of.”

“You could ask Lord Elrond,” Glorfindel suggests, thinking the image might help in the completion.

But Erestor chuckles and insists, “No, for that would mean admitting that I do not know myself. I am sure he expected me to finish long before now. ...But there is time yet in the world. It will be completed. One day.”

For a moment, the two are quiet, staring at the desk. Glorfindel tries another configuration that still isn’t successful—it seems a difficult thing indeed. Finally he muses, “Perhaps I could finish it. I am not always needed on the council, and guests rarely interrupt my schedule as they do yours.”

Then Erestor really laughs, shaking his pretty head. “I highly doubt it.”

“But I like a challenge.” Fixing Erestor with a grin, Glorfindel presses, “And you can always make it interesting for me. Offer me a prize if I manage, and then I will be forced to do nothing but work at it until I might present you with your answer.”

Glorfindel half expects a rejection, but Erestor does look faintly amused. He informs Glorfindel, “Even if I had anything to offer you, it would matter not. You will not complete this, though I would be delighted if you did. It was clearly made in the spirit of the days of old, where time had no meaning.”

“Elrond is not so old,” Glorfindel insists, “And you have plenty to offer me.”

Erestor seems to think on it a moment. Glorfindel waits, silently hopeful, until at last Erestor sighs, “Very well. If you should complete it, I will give you whatever you should ask of me, so long as it is within my power.”

A wide grin stretches across Glorfindel’s face. It’s far more than he hoped for. He informs Erestor, “In that case, I will work tirelessly on this until the task is done.”

Erestor just shakes his head again while Glorfindel takes hold of the wooden box open on the other corner of the desk, the one the puzzle must have been stored in. He slips the finished corner inside carefully, not wanting to dislodge what’s already there, and then he scoops the rest up on top of it, casually wondering how many there are—several thousand, he thinks, if not more. Each is hardly bigger than his thumb, and the painting style looks soft and severely blended. But he has the best motivation he possibly could, and he has no doubts that he’ll make his goal. 

When the puzzle is all neatly stored, Erestor suggests they go for their walk, but for the first time since meeting Erestor, Glorfindel turns the offer down. He now has other business to attend to, and he retreats to his quarters.

He has no idea how big the puzzle will be. He doesn’t know where to put it and worries his own desk won’t be enough. The next day, he passes Lindir in the halls and requests a large table that Lindir is quick to have delivered to him. Glorfindel moves the puzzle there, and it becomes the centerpiece of his room.

With his desk chair drawn up to it, Glorfindel works. He aims first for the edges—they can be difficult to find amongst the many pieces, but he sorts them out eventually, even though he knows that with a puzzle of this level, a smooth side might not necessarily mean it belongs on the edge. He sorts them all out anyway. 

Eventually, after nearly a week, he discovers all four of the corner pieces, out of a dozen pieces with two flat sides, though he isn’t sure which places they belong to. For all he knows, he’s constructing the entire thing upside down. One piece is entirely square with no other indentations. But he’s managed to string two of the corners together and has convinced himself that no other pieces go with the fourth. The bit Erestor formed is also too flat for too far to be anything but a corner. From there, it’s a little simpler, though still very time consuming and difficult. The colours are all in the same garden-like pallet, in greens, pinks, peaches and browns, and he’s convinced certain hues have been dulled in the sun, making it difficult to find which ones truly belong. Still, he persists.

He persists mainly because of his end goal: what he’ll ask of Erestor.

At first, Erestor asks him each morning how his progress goes, and Glorfindel responds well whether or not it is, and he thinks then of claiming longer walks for his prize. Or perhaps having Erestor join him for lunch afterwards, but in more than just the simple meals they’ve shared casually. He thinks of asking Erestor to enjoy _dinner_ with him, perhaps on a blanket out on the grass, looking up at the stars. Or in his quarters.

He thinks about asking Erestor to his quarters after the moon has fallen, kissing Erestor as deeply as he’s always wanted to, and asking Erestor to tell him when to stop, _but Erestor never would_.

It takes a month for Glorfindel to piece together three corners. The third is still disconnected, but he knows now where it goes, and the orientation. The puzzle is very large, definitely needing his entire table. He half wonders how Elrond ever expected _anyone_ to finish. And then it occurs to him that perhaps this puzzle wasn’t _meant_ to be done alone, and that Elrond had hoped to coax Erestor into inviting friends back to his quarters. 

Glorfindel thinks of being the sole one invited back there, and using his one wish to bring ropes with him and bind Erestor to the headboard, where Glorfindel might take him swift and steadily before he changed his mind again. Erestor can be so very strict that it’s impossible not to imagine tying him up, one way or another, to fix his rigid posture into place, his hands behind his back, his front crisscrossed with rope and devoid of any fabric. Glorfindel’s often pictured this over the years, pictured Erestor any number of ways in wholly inappropriate context, but he always dismissed it as having no possibility. He wonders now if completing this might soften Erestor up just enough to get that first kiss.

And then Glorfindel might just be able to turn it into more, and perhaps Erestor would like to give him more, like to reward him with the sort of wild, depraved things no one would ever expect of Imladris’ chief councilor. Glorfindel imagines taking him right there in the council’s courtyard, bent over the little stone dais in the center, his robes around his knees and his rear stuffed full of Glorfindel’s cock. He’d probably scream loud enough to wake all his guests. Or perhaps his taut control would allow him to hold it back, or else he would beg Glorfindel to hold a hand over his mouth and stifle all his cries. Glorfindel would, of course, oblige, and kiss his neck and shoulders and bend him further down, press his naked chest against the platform, and pound into him all the harder. He’d feel _wondrous_.

His mouth would be too, Glorfindel thinks, when he first finds a piece that looks vaguely like _lips_. He starts to suspect that figures are in the painting, though he doesn’t know yet of what kind or how many. He starts to sort out the pieces that _could_ belong to people, the peach and tan ones he’d early mistaken for other parts of the garden. The browns aren’t quite textured right—they look more like fur or hair. He’s sure the background is an array of flowers, and these are hardest of all to match. But he manages, somewhat, to start putting faces together. 

He doesn’t get more than halfway through before he’s taken to a standstill and resigns to work on other parts of the picture, though the daydreams that already stirred up in him remain. He thinks of winning the use of Erestor’s mouth, of having Erestor kneel beneath his desk and warm his cock while he worked, perhaps suckling him gently, then swallowing him down and drinking his seed with a languid moan. He has to stop working on the puzzle when he imagines this. He has to drop one hand to massage himself through his breeches, and it takes some time before he manages to slowly go forward with the other one, though his mind is far away from the picture before him, lost in the lewd imagining of being buried down Erestor’s tight throat and pulling out to spray all over Erestor’s handsome face.

He thinks of staying inside Erestor’s mouth all night, of rolling over and pounding harshly into it, then relaxing while it fills again, still snug within Erestor’s smooth lips, until he might milk out another round and another. Erestor’s the one elf in Imladris who could probably manage it. He probably never chokes or gags. He could probably keep his jaw stretched for hours, his tongue talented and slick. When Glorfindel shuts his eyes, he can picture it: the way Erestor would lap at his cock, take it in, and suckle on it until the lord of the Golden Flower finally allowed him release. Glorfindel imagines Erestor would come many times himself, humping the mattress vainly and whimpering around Glorfindel’s cock, and Glorfindel would be kind and stroke him. After each new spill, Erestor would slump gratefully, allowing his mouth to remain full but too tired to lavish it properly, and then, after a short recovery period, would diligently resume his duties, and they would pass the entire night in that ebb and flow. 

It becomes more and more difficult to repeat the progress of the puzzle to Erestor in the mornings, because it gets to the point in Glorfindel’s mind where it’s so irrevocably entwined with his sexual fantasies that he can’t seem to say a thing without blushing. Erestor seems to mistake it for failure and stops asking, but he also doesn’t ask for the puzzle back. 

It takes an entire season for Glorfindel to fill in two of the three elves in the picture. He’s sure that’s what they are, though he doesn’t recognize their faces. A third stands between them, still incomplete, with dark brown-black hair and perhaps a more youthful visage. There’s something vaguely _familiar_ about the picture as a whole, like something Glorfindel might have seen decades past, but not well enough to properly recall. Glorfindel’s sure now that the puzzle is comprised of at least ten thousand pieces; dozens go into each face. He returns again to the flowery border, which is coming together, and what he thinks might be a brown horse standing behind them. It makes him think of taking Erestor out on Asfaloth.

And then, as he continues stroking himself through his work, he imagines leading Asfaloth with Erestor alone on top. He’s devised a new contraption in his head, one he would never be able to conceive of if not for the occasional friendship with Dwarven guests, where a long, shapely rod would be attached to the saddle. Erestor would be impaled on it, filled to the brim, either naked or through a deliberate hole in his robes to conceal it from others. And each step Glorfindel led Asfaloth through would jostle Erestor, thrusting the wooden cock harder inside him, and Erestor would gasp and squirm, fingers white-knuckled in Asfaloth’s mane and his pretty mouth caught open. He would likely beg Glorfindel for mercy after the first ride, but Glorfindel would only hop on behind him and take him much farther, faster, so that the wind might swallow his cries. 

In the stables afterwards, his channel would be so sore that he wouldn’t allow Glorfindel in him for two days, and on the third, he would come to Glorfindel and plead for the feeling of a warm, pliant cock that could take him with more mercy. And Glorfindel would be gentle with him and make sweet love to him, apologizing for such a vulgar use of his prize.

Many of these fantasies are equally long. Others are just fleeting snippets—feeding Erestor a glass of his seed, pinching little bejeweled trinkets to Erestor’s nipples, fucking Erestor in a raw field of dirt and grass that would normally have Erestor’s nose turned up—but he always tries to rein it back in in the mornings, where he must meet Erestor’s eyes without turning red. He knows he’ll never actually ask for the bawdy things his overactive mind describes, but he thinks he might ask Erestor to _consider_ one without judgment. He soon thinks the best part of the arrangement is the opportunity to confess his feelings and desires with the hopeful stipulation that Erestor allow him the chance to prove he can still be a good friend if Erestor doesn’t want anything else. A part of him thinks that Erestor is likely an incredibly kinky person under his stern façade, and the rest is sure Erestor is simply as proper as he seems and utterly uninterested in _anything_ involving the removal of one’s clothes.

He thinks of taking off Erestor’s clothes with his teeth, he thinks of pulling Erestor’s hair, and he thinks of spending days doing nothing but worshiping Erestor’s flawless body. 

And then, when nearly a year has past, after having to pause here and there for one mission or another but _never_ packing away the puzzle, Glorfindel presses in the final piece, and he realizes what he’s created.

The painting is beautiful. It depicts two elves standing before their horse, wearing the ceremonial silver robes of ones about to sail, and what must have been their son posed between them, dressed to say behind. His features are soft, lovely, his smile warm but his eyes sad. Glorfindel recognizes the younger Erestor he never knew. He realizes then why the picture seems vaguely familiar: a similar painting, smaller and thusly sharper, is tucked away in Erestor’s closet. Glorfindel saw it once when helping Erestor change quarters after his promotion to chief councilor. But he’d forgotten it since, and he thinks Erestor has too. 

And he thinks he might understand Lord Elrond’s intention, of giving Erestor something to work on that revealed, in the end, nothing about work at all, but something else worth striving for that he should cherish: those around him. 

And it makes Glorfindel feel horribly guilty for having spent most of the puzzle imagining how he could thoroughly debauch one of Imladris’ greatest treasures. 

It’s a crisp winter morning when he can finally tell Erestor, “I have completed the puzzle.”

Erestor stops walking, pausing to glance aside at him, haloed in the light from outside the corridor and looking as stunning as ever. His dark hair and eyes stand out vividly against the white blanket beyond the pillars. Frowning lightly, Erestor murmurs, “I had quite forgotten. ...I did not think you would.”

“Nor did I, at many points,” Glorfindel admits, donning a little smile. “When I rode east to check in on the Shire again, I thought for sure I would come back to find Lindir had ignored my orders and tidied all my chambers. But I did not, and I managed.”

A grin finally breaks out across Erestor’s gorgeous face, one made all the more special for its rarity, and he admits, “I am impressed.”

Glorfindel asks, “Would you like to see it?”

“I would love to.”

They forgo the rest of that morning’s discussion. Glorfindel leads the way up to his quarters, ones Erestor hasn’t been to nearly enough, where the puzzle is laid out on the table in the center of his room. Erestor stops in the doorway, mouth falling open, and takes a moment to complete his walk to the picture.

There, he _stares_ at it, the smile gone from his face. Glorfindel watches him, the captivated look he bears and the slight pinch of surprise, wonderment, and even embarrassment. For a long moment, they’re both silent.

Then Erestor murmurs, “I should have done it myself. He has always told me that I do not spend enough time in leisure, on my own personal pleasure, and because of this, I have robbed myself of the reward.” He hesitates, then glances at Glorfindel to explain, “They are my parents, you know.” Glorfindel nods, having guessed as much, and is told, “They have already sailed into the West. They had this scene painted for me to remember them, though I promised not to forget. I knew I would also sail someday and see them again. Just... I still have much to do.” 

Again, Glorfindel nods. He himself could sail any time, having completed the duties he was sent for, but he waits now for something else entirely. He’s met many elves in his time, seen many lands, even known many other peoples. And he knows there’s no one like _Erestor_ anywhere in Middle Earth, nor even in Valinor. So he waits, as he will until Erestor is ready.

Erestor shakes his head as though to clear it, then tilts his head back and lets out a long sigh. When he straights again, a smile is on his face, one _free_ , reminded of good things. He looks straight into Glorfindel’s eyes to say, full of sincerity, “ _Thank you._ ” And then: “You have done it. And now the reward is yours: what do you ask of me?”

Glorfindel’s thought of this carefully. He’s pondered the question for the entire year, but he’s only recently conceived of his real choice. And he reports: “Nothing, for answering your question and bringing a memory of happiness to you is reward enough.”

For only the second time that Glorfindel’s ever seen—the first being the reveal of the puzzle—Erestor looks at him in surprise. Glorfindel warmly returns the gaze, knowing this is all he _really_ wanted. Erestor to be happy. When Erestor looks down at the painting, that seems to be his prime emotion.

Not quite looking at Glorfindel, he murmurs half to himself, “They were right. And so is Lord Elrond. I... must take more time out for the pleasures of life.”

Glorfindel nods yet again, though he’s sure Erestor doesn’t see it.

Then Erestor sucks in a long breath, turns to look at him, and firmly asks, “Would you like to have dinner with me, perhaps under the stars?”


End file.
